


Diverging From a Fixed Path

by Deejaymil



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Angst, Drug Use, Eventual Smut, F/M, Falling In Love, Self-Destruction, Sexual Content, Sexual Tension, Unrequited Love, Winner of the 2015 Profiler's Choice Awards - Best Emily/Reid
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-24
Updated: 2015-10-27
Packaged: 2018-04-27 21:47:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5065528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/pseuds/Deejaymil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Emily Prentiss wasn't sure if it was lust that meant that every time he walked into a room, he took all the air out of it.</p>
<p>She was reasonably sure that it wasn't love, because that would be ridiculous. After all, falling in love with the perpetually awkward and socially disconnected Spencer Reid was a guaranteed recipe for disaster, right?</p>
<p>Besides, she wasn't even sure if he was capable of returning the sentiment.</p>
<p>
  <strong> Winner of the 2015 Profiler's Choice Awards - Best Emily/Reid </strong>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Tips for the Care and Handling of Spencer Reid

**Author's Note:**

> Elle’s replacement was tall, dark haired, dark-eyed and most importantly, not Elle. Spencer Reid avoided her gaze, unsure of himself around this new, confident stranger.

“Emily Prentiss,” she introduced herself, stepping in front of him and thrusting a hand out to be shaken. Reid stared at it for a moment, nonplussed, eyeing the heavily bitten nails and the slender fingers before trailing his regard up to her face.

Concerned eyes met his. He forced a smile, knowing that it sat oddly on his face. “Spencer Reid. Err… Doctor. Dr. Spencer Reid. It’s good to meet you.” He winced at the forced formality of using his title, already regretting the choice.

But her smile was genuine. “Well, Dr. Spencer Reid, I need someone to show me around this place, it’s like a labyrinth! I have my fingers crossed for some decent coffee.” He knew his face had lit up at the mention of coffee. Emily’s eyes flickered past his shoulder, no doubt sharing a triumphant glance with Morgan or JJ. So, they’d already trained the new recruit on how to deal with their ‘pet’ genius then. Reid wasn’t quite sure if he was charmed by their concern, or hurt that they’d felt the need to coach her.

“Of course,” he stuttered out, wondering if the sickly sense of shame at being the odd one out showed in his voice. No one else had needed ‘tips for the care and handling of.’ “There’s a kitchenette over here that usually has coffee.”

She followed him, chattering pleasantly about mundanities, and if her eyes lingered overlong on his slender form when he reached up to get her a mug, he didn’t notice.

 

* * *

 

It’d been such a long time since Prentiss had meshed so well with a group of people that she’d almost forgotten how good it felt to _belong_. She was spending her days with people she really liked, doing work that changed lives, and it was the most settled she’d been in years. Certainly a long cry from the oiliness that the work with Doyle had left her with.

In the end, the choice to accompany her new team out for post-case drinks at a local bar they favoured was a quick one. Prentiss made a point of taking any chance offered to unwind, and she really wanted an opportunity to pick the brain of one Dr. Spencer Reid. The man was fascinating. His encyclopaedic mind and eidetic memory combined with his natural quickness of mind made him an intriguing person to be around, and she sorely wanted to know what made a man like that tick. She’d watched him read a book on a flight home once, watching the way he’d positively devoured the words. It made her oddly jealous and overly conscious of her own reduced abilities. A mind like that could so easily make others feel mundane in comparison, and she wondered how often that had led to his exclusion from teams and groups.  

But, she’d also seen the almost protective way the rest of the team gathered around him, how Gideon introduced him as ‘Doctor’ to make him seem older and how Morgan hovered watchfully in his vicinity if they were in the field. Her first day there, each one of them had ‘subtlety’ approached her with tips and veiled warnings on how to talk to him. It wasn’t that they thought he was fragile, they just expected the worst of others. It hurt to wonder why they would react like that.

He was drunk and gazing at his glass when she slid onto the bar stool next to him. “So, Dr. Reid,” she began, adopting a light tone, “in deep thought about the contents of your beer?” He looked up at her with a lopsided grin and eyes that glittered with the alcohol he’d consumed. Something low in her belly gave a hard jolt at that look, suddenly aware of the way his top lip glittered with leftover moisture from his drink and averting her eyes quickly before he realized that she was staring.

_Christ._ She had _not_ expected that.

“Calculating the rate of condensation actually,” Reid replied, mop-hair flopping puppy-dog like down into his eyes. His tongue darted out and flicked over his lip, turning the jolt into a concerning heat that had her reaching for her own drink to hide her flush of warmth.

“Really?” she asked, raising an eyebrow and hoping to hell that she wasn’t blushing. She really needed to get laid if all it took was a smile from a colleague in his mid-twenties to have her vividly imagining his agile hands having their filthy way with her. But there was laughter in his eyes and something darker that had her suspecting that he knew why she was suddenly breaking out in a fine sweat. Of course, he knew. It was his _job_ to read body language, he did it daily.

“Not really. I was actually using the reflection of the glass to watch Morgan trying to chat up that lady over there. I’m wondering when he’s going to notice that she’s not interested.”

Prentiss turned her head to see the woman, glad of the chance to face away from that all-knowing gaze. “Why wouldn’t she be interested?” she asked, barely holding back a stupid-drunk giggle at the hang-dog expression on Morgan’s face. “Morgan’s gorgeous, what woman wouldn’t want him?”

Reid seemed to have become newly refocused on his drink when she turned back, his mouth suddenly secretly downcast.  She idly wondered how many women had broken past his defences and kissed away that moroseness before. “A woman interested in other women?” he pointed out with a slight shake of his shoulders and a twitch at the corner of those sad lips.

Oh, poor Morgan. He’d never live down missing that.

Her drink spilled slightly over her hand, sticky and warmed by the muggy air of the crowded bar. Reid reached out with a napkin and brushed it over her hand, mopping up the liquid and leaving her skin tingling with the memory of his touch.

She really needed to get laid.

 

* * *

 

It was his job to read body language, to know what people were thinking and feeling without them needing to enunciate the emotions, but Emily Prentiss was still somehow an enigma to him. He was no stranger to physical intimacy, no matter what the others might think, but emotional intimacy had always left him cold. Negotiating the pitfalls and perils of social interactions long enough to embark upon a healthy and long term relationship?

Well, to put it simply, he didn’t get four PhDs by spending all his time learning how to be a decent partner.

There was a moment, a single moment when her eyes had met his and he’d almost fallen into pupils that were suddenly dark. _A trick of the light,_ said the part of his brain that always told him he was wrong, but when he’d reached out a napkin to brush the beer from her hand, his fingers had skimmed over a warm wrist with a pulse that fluttered frantically against his skin. _Arousal,_ said the logic part of his brain, and he was abruptly thinking of her in his bed, in his arms, and realizing just how long it had been since he’d invited someone to do so. It was basic physiology, the body’s reaction to sexual arousal. He knew that. But for a single moment, his mind had stuttered over the possibility that this beautiful, clever woman was interested in him. Interested, somehow, in scrawny, awkward Spencer Reid with the hair that badly needed a cut and the oddly coloured shirts.

And then she’d leaned past him to squint across the smoggy bar to Morgan, and his confidence had plummeted. Of course it was Morgan, wasn’t it always? So, he’d reclined back somewhat on his stool, avoided direct eye-contact with her, and changed the subject to something less painful to contemplate.

He doubted it was his body she was interested in, anyway, and surely not his heart. Everything else was just transport.

 

* * *

 

She wasn’t quite sure when it had happened. One moment he was just her ever-so-marginally attractive co-worker, full of facts and figures and barely restrained social anxieties, until the nest moment he was suddenly so much more.

Maybe it was the first time she’d seen him slip into his ‘agent’ skin, turning coolly confident and ever so dangerous. Or maybe it was the day when she’d dozed off on the jet flying home and he’d leaned over her to pull the blanket more squarely onto her shoulders, leaving behind the slighted scent of coffee and sweat.

Maybe it was when she looked up from her book one day and saw him asleep on that same couch, his long limbs sprawled clumsily in a space too small for them and mouth slipping open. The most vulnerable she’d ever seen him: completely unguarded. She hadn’t realized she’d been staring until JJ nudged her, having asked her a question three times without a response. When Prentiss had turned to answer, for a moment JJ’s eyes had darted between her and him, brow creased with something almost like concern. Prentiss had carefully kept the subject away from Reid, not wanting to be put in the position where she felt obligated to quantify her feelings on the subject. She wasn’t even sure herself if she was half in love with the guy, or if she just really, _really_ wanted to jump his bones.

Instead of thinking more about that, she went out alone after and found a man of average height with black hair like silk in her fingers, and took him home. He was brisk in bed, charming enough in his own way, and he brought her over the edge with a perfunctory movement of his fingers right before he himself shuddered against her. It was quick and meaningless and exactly what she wanted, but when she closed her eyes and put her mouth against his skin, it was hazel eyes and a quick smile she was visualizing.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes she had to fight the all-encompassing desire to open up that brain of his and see what made him tick, to see the gears and wheels in motions, especially when he stood in front of them half-demented with excitement and almost twitching out of his skin.

“You’re especially manic today,” she teased him one day, less than a week before _it_ happened.

He shrugged, turning in his seat and adjusting the seat belt, his leg jiggling against the dash. “I’m always manic. It’s my one setting.” He was rarely wrong, but she glanced at his face and could visualize every emotion he was capable of in a dizzying clarity. She wasn’t aware when she’d created a mental encyclopaedia of his moods, but at some point, she’d tuned into them and never tuned out. That really didn’t bode well for her ‘it’s just sexual frustration’ theory.

“That’s not true,” she settled for saying, watching his eyes dart to her questioningly. “Sometimes you’re just… happy.”

And they continued like that; with her not admitting anything to anyone, least of all herself, and Reid by their side like a constant reminder. She could never resent him for that. No matter how bad her day was, she could turn and smile at him and he’d light up and spare her a deliciously addictive insight into that mind that was nothing like she could convince herself was lust.

And then _it_ happened. They were in Georgia and in one fell swoop, he was gone and she couldn’t think for the absence of him.

 

* * *

 

The first video was horrifying in every possible way. Prentiss wasn’t sure if she wanted to cry or vomit from seeing him blinking slowly at the camera, blood plastering his hair to his forehead and bound tightly to that hateful chair. She’d have nightmares about that chair in the future. Not with him; the dreams with him were always different, powerful in their own way but with none of the horror. No, there were nightmares of that chair in a room and it was always empty. Sometimes it was tipped.

Sometimes it was broken.

The second video was worse. Prentiss watched as Reid’s lanky frame hit the floor and shuddered its way into a gasping seizure, his face obscured by lank hair. She didn’t realize that she was holding her breath until he stopped breathing completely, letting out one final pained gasp that tore out of her throat and left her raw and just as stopped as he was. She couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe, and he was dead. Dead in front of them with his skin cooling and his elegant hands silenced forever, lips turning blue and eyes excruciatingly vacant. He was dead. The word danced through her brain like a cruel schoolyard chant. _Dead, dead, dead, you’ve failed him, and now he’ll never know._

He was dead, until suddenly he wasn’t, and she was watching him steadfastly refusing to name a team member to condemn without even accepting the time in between. Her brain kicked back on just in time to quantify the missing minutes. _Pick me_ , she thought, realizing with a jolt just how much more important he was than her. A world without Spencer Reid couldn’t exist, _couldn’t_. She would never allow it. It wasn’t until they found him standing by a grave he’d dug for himself, that she realized she hadn’t felt anything since that moment she’d watched him stop living.

She touched his arm, just once, and she still felt nothing.

 

* * *

 

The drugs didn’t make it easier, but they made it bearable. For some reason, every time Reid slipped a needle into his skin, he tumbled into oblivion imagining the disapproving gaze of familiar brown eyes. But when he woke up, cold and shaking on his couch or the floor of his bathroom, he was always alone.


	2. The Parts of Us We Lose

Prentiss found herself lying awake at night, reliving the moment where they’d found him standing by the grave over and over again. Relieving those wide, blank eyes sunk in pallid skin as he’d stumbled into Hotch’s arms.  She tried to banish the image from her mind, and replace it with happier memories of him, but it continued to creep back in like a noxious gas, colouring all their interactions.

When he returned to work, it was with shadowed eyes and careful, measured movements. His words were clipped, his temper shortened, and there was something about the rigid way he held himself that sunk a spike of concern deep into Emily’s brain. It wasn’t a subtle change. She watched him explain a geographic profile to the team one day, examining how his hands hung motionless by his side, and she realized something with a cold shiver.

Something of him had never left that shack.

 

* * *

 

He could feel their judging eyes on him. He was careful around them, hiding all the signs of his weakness, but he knew they could see it poisoning his every conversation with them. The irony here was that he’d been so adamant that he wasn’t weak, that he didn’t deserve to be punished, but as soon as he’d escaped Hankel’s clutches, he’d proven that he was wrong all along.

He was weak. This was his punishment.

He was measuring sugar into his coffee one morning when Emily came up beside him, laying a sympathetic hand on his arm. The warmth of her skin burned through his long sleeve, and he jerked back out of her reach, horribly aware that the evidence of that weakness lay directly underneath her palm. Never quite in control of his emotions anymore, always on the fine edge of losing track of his expressions, he wasn’t surprised when she drew back with startled eyes.

“Don’t,” he snapped, seeing her open her mouth to say something trite and useless and cutting her off before she could bother with an impractical offer of sympathy, or friendship. He left her standing there and went back to his desk without his coffee, the skin of his inner arm prickling guiltily under his shirt.

It was better this way.

 

* * *

 

It was a rough case, even by their standards, so when he vanished halfway through, she volunteered to go and find him. The others didn’t argue, just smiled nervously and exchanged anxious looks as she slipped out of the room. She found him in his room at the hotel, just staring numbly at the patterned wallpaper, and for a moment she had the bizarre thought that she was looking at a ghost.

When she slipped onto the bed next to him, he didn’t respond. If it weren’t for the shallow rise of his shoulders with his breathing, he’d be completely motionless. It was some sort of perverse joke on her inappropriate attraction to him, even now, that the hollowness of his face only served to emphasize the sharp line of his cheekbones and the wideness of his eyes, but she’d never really been less inclined to admire his appearance. This was the closest she’d been to him since he’d blown up at her a month ago, and she almost wished he’d do that again. At least that was some showing of emotion.

But she didn’t know how to drag him back from the dark place he’d gone, trapped in his own brilliant mind. Instead, she wrapped her arms around him and pulled him into an unresisting embrace, feeling the way his heart jackrabbited in his chest at her touch, hearing the soft whisper of his hitching breath. How long it had been since he’d let someone just hold him like this? It was a sick realization for her, one that shivered through her arms and into him, that Hankel was probably the last person to be physically close to him.

He pulled himself out of her arms after a long, terrible moment and stood looking down on her with eyes that were dark and empty. It was impossible to meet his gaze for long, the coldness of his expressionless face shattering any illusions she’d had of making any sort of progress here. He looked through her in a way that suggested she wasn’t even there, as though she was the ghost in the room and he the only substantial thing. She fought the desire to pinch her arm to make sure she was still awake, and not trapped in one of her nightmares, but then he leaned down. For a brief instant, his breath tickled her cheek, warm and damp, and she thought wildly that he was about to kiss her.

“Don’t touch me,” he said indifferently, and walked out of the room as a stranger to her, leaving her sitting there with her pulse bounding and fingers curled tightly into her clammy palms. When she went back to the precinct, he acted as though nothing had happened. Maybe nothing had. Maybe she was going a little mad. She wondered if any of them could tell that she’d been crying.

 

* * *

 

There was no telling what was going on in his head anymore, but he was certain that somewhere he’d lost track of the thread of his life. The only consolation was that the team had finally stopped crowding around him and began to draw back, ostensibly to give him space but he could see the hatred in their eyes towards this creature masquerading as their friend. Some days he felt cornered by their perceptiveness, backed into a corner by his own deceptions, and it only served to make the cravings stronger.

It was easy enough to rationalize in the end. Just once more, to get through this case. Just a few more times to get some sleep. Keep on going so appearances don’t deteriorate and alarm people. Eventually it was even easier, why rationalize it at all? Everyone else has their coping mechanisms, why was this so terrible?

Emily made him feel wary, as though she was always ever so slightly attuned to his moods. She was the first to look up when he moved to leave a room, eyes narrowed in suspicion, and she was always the first to look for him when he stayed away too long, but she never repeated the moment from the hotel room. They kept a measured distance that he was thankful for between them after that.

He could rationalize that away, too. The desperate, all-consuming desire to bury his face in her neck and tell her everything was just his exhaustion with the work building and making him irrational. He’d have done the same no matter who had come looking for him; he’d just been weak that day. The fact that it was _Emily_ didn’t matter. And he could prove that. It would be _so_ easy to prove how little she meant to him outside of the workplace.

The worst thing about spending an increasing amount of time either high or coming down was the numbness that characterized his every waking day, making time sneak by in strange chunks. Sometimes it oozed as though he was trying to move through honey, every second drawing on endlessly, the next it jumped by in great leaps and he’d lose days of his life to blankness. While it was a novelty to have something that he couldn’t remember, he couldn’t build the energy to be interested in it.

One evening he closed his eyes in his apartment, alone, and when he opened them it was the next night and he was holding a glass of bitter alcohol in a crowded bar. There was a woman with dark eager eyes sitting flush against his side.

“Who is Emily?” she asked him, and he wondered what he’d been telling her and instead covered her mouth with his own, nipping and biting and furiously heated. There was nothing shy or careful about his actions. Everything from his mouth to his hands curling around her torso whispered _sex_ and it was enough to stall any unwanted questions from this stranger he was using to prove a point to himself.

She was a vicious line of heat from his thigh to his shoulder, and when he went home with her that night and fucked her without compunction, he lied to himself and said it didn’t matter that she was a stranger. After all, what was one more lie? He could add it to the others. The ones like _I’m okay_ and _she means nothing to me_ and even, _I’m okay with feeling nothing._

 

* * *

 

He was late one morning, eyelids darkly lidded with exhaustion and face drawn. When he brushed by her to reach his seat, she caught the light scent of an unfamiliar soap. He turned his head to peer at the plasma and she saw a dark mark painted on the delicate skin of his neck, carefully placed right where his pulse would flutter against someone’s mouth. It felt like a kick to her gut, and she wasn’t sure if it was concern or jealousy that turned her throat dry.

Morgan saw it too and there was a fleeting moment where once he’d have made a light-hearted joke; instead, he swallowed heavily and his expression turned dark.

 

* * *

 

She came to him one night. He supposed that it was a wonder they’d left him alone as long as they had; something had to give eventually. Ignored the knocking on his door, he curled further into himself on the couch, focusing on the distance the burn in his veins gave him from his surroundings. There was blood on his skin, a line of it. Spatter from the hypodermic, dry and brown. He picked at it numbly and felt his muscles twitching with the movement, aware that he couldn’t answer the door anyway. One look at him like this and she’d know instantly. Even with his newfound disassociation, he didn’t know if he could bear to see the disgust and condemnation she’d no doubt throw at him.

The scrape of a key in his lock had him bolting upright, heart thumping frantically against his ribs and head whirling with the possibility of discovery. How had she gotten a key?

“Spencer,” she said softly, coming through the doorway and spotting him immediately. He was vivid in the gloom of the darkened room, salient against the windows behind him. Thankfully, he hadn’t turned the lights on before letting himself gleefully fall earlier, hiding his indiscretions. So far. He scratched hard and wondered if she knew that she was beautiful.

“Why are you here?” he asked in a voice that wasn’t at all as harsh as he’d tried to make it, instead just sounding croaky and plaintive as though he was recovering from a bad cold. Instead of replying, she stepped towards him and the windows behind him. The light of a passing car illuminated her face, tired and worried and something else that he couldn’t begin to understand. And beautiful. Oh god, so beautiful. His breath caught, the drugs and the glint of blue-white light on her profile igniting in his blood and his hands and dragging him inexorably towards her. Just for a moment. Just a moment. Like a moth dancing around a flame well aware of his inflammable wings but unwilling to leave the illusive warmth it cast.

She began talking but he couldn’t hear her through the thump of his heartbeat in his brain. Later, he wouldn’t sure if he’d meant to do what he did at all, or if it was the fading remnants of the drug that had given him the courage.

In that moment, she was everything. The needle, the drug, the burn. The desire and the wanting.

And then she was in his arms and he was falling.

 

* * *

 

She was exhausted and tired of worrying about him, tired of watching him slip away day by day. There were moments when he was almost himself again, when a new puzzle came up or a case to solve and his eyes would light up in a vivid reminder of what they’d lost that day. She’d tried to desperately cling to those moments, but they’d slipped away like water cupped in her shaking hands.

Instead, she obsessed over them until the night they woke her in a cold swear. There was no ignoring her unease anymore. She _had_ to do something—or they’d lose him. They couldn’t lose him. There were so many things she didn’t know anymore, but god did she know that absolutely.

She went to his home and let herself in with a key lifted from the third drawer of Hotch’s desk. Reid jerked up from his seat on the couch with strange, jittering movements, his hair wild and face painfully confused. He’d been sleeping. There was a crease on his cheek from where his face had been pressed into his sleeve as he’d dozed. Bizarrely, it was that crease that hurt her the most. It was so human, and she loved him for it.

Words escaped her. In the silent haze of his musty apartment, surrounded by the scent of too much male and not enough air, she tried to tell him how much they need him to stop destroying himself. He just watched her silently with an unfathomable expression. Suddenly she was angry, something she should have been a month and a half ago when he’d first decided to be a bloody idiot and give up on himself.

“What gives you the right to not even try to move on from this?” she shouted, and at some point, she’d stepped forward and grabbed his shirt to shake some sense into him.

He tilted his head slightly and regarded her with alien eyes that lit a spark of alarm in her chest. They were dark. Endless. _Hungry._ She had seen that expression before, but never on a friend, never on him. Opening her mouth to ask him a question that she hadn’t even formed properly in her mind, suddenly he was pressed against her in a crushing grip with his lips on hers.

It was a clumsy, awkward kiss and she froze in shock, un-reciprocating as his lips slotted against hers and his breath warmed her mouth. His hands threaded through her hair, his body bowed against her, and he was a warm, everything pressure against her body. He kissed as though he was trying to crawl inside her, hungry and frantic, and their teeth clattered together, leaving the taste of him in her mouth. For a moment, she thought about pushing him away, a small part of her mind completely thrown by this uncharacteristic behaviour.

But then his mouth found her throat, teeth nipping at the base and pulling them tight enough together that she could feel the soft _ah_ of hunger that surged through him. Before, he’d been desperately kissing; now, he was needy. A soft noise of wanting slipped from his lips and she felt him shudder and stall as his eyes widened and darted up to catch her gaze. Her back against the wall with his body tight against hers, she was vaguely aware of hissing air between her teeth in a withheld moan as his tongue danced cleverly over a pressure point she wasn’t even aware of. They rocked together—her hands were around his waist and she didn’t remember placing them there—out of sync and out of place, until he seemed to stop stalling and slipped his leg forward to ease her legs apart with a warm, firm thigh.

Her startled gasp encouraged him and his hips rocked in a careful rhythm. One cool hand slipped from her hair and up her shirt to curl around her breast. At some point, she’d wrapped her arms around him and pulled him closer, as though trying to have his every part of his slender form pressed hard against her. And _Christ,_ hard he was; one of her hands drifted to his tented pants seemingly without asking her permission and skipped over a warm bump, aching to press down hard and feel him mewl and wiggle into her touch. She thought of him naked. She thought of him coming. She thought of him slamming his cock inside her with his eyes locked on hers and that intense focus spooling apart. And then she shook herself and gasped with how far she was gone already. 

“What… what are you doing?” she whimpered, as his hand slipped away from her breast and ghosted down her belly, leaving behind a trail of goosebumps on her skin. He didn’t answer, just hummed against her throat, leaning his head against her so that his eyelashes fluttered against her neck as he blinked. Now he was looking at her. Almost painfully intent.

She’d wondered before if he was actually a virgin; spent nights at home with one hand between her legs imagining him bringing some faceless woman to orgasm and shuddering through her own with the sound of his gasps in her mind. She’d always assumed he’d had sex, although admittedly not much of it, envisaging him as a slow and careful lover. She’d assumed he’d treat sex like everything in his life, with a delightful eagerness to please that showed in his eyes and smile.

There was nothing shy or slow about the hunger in the man against her, and she wasn’t sure if she was disappointed or relieved. Within a few short minutes, he’d reduced her to a panting mess, and as his hand deftly undid the top button of her jeans and slid in, cupping around her groin, she gasped and rocked into him, undone. There was no hiding how ready she was, especially as his eyes lifted with something that was almost familiar, a strange sort of awe at feeling the truth of her attraction to him damp against his hand. A long finger crooked up, outlined her, before slipping curiously instead to be met with another flush of hot wet, and he made a strange noise and choked out, “ _Fuck_.” For a second, thrown, his hips stuttered unevenly and his expression glazed as his finger shivered inside her. That needle of disquiet appeared in her mind again, almost knocking her off the knife’s edge of her oncoming climax as he tried to distract her with a thumb against her clit.

“Bed,” he hissed into her shoulder, mouthing at the skin agitatedly, pressing his hips against her leg. She could only whimper as she felt the hard length of his own arousal hot against her. Imagining it was one thing, having the object of months of fantasies suddenly panting in her ear and digging into her thigh was completely another. He pulled away from her, one hand gripping her arm tightly and tugging her down the hall, and the cool air hit her like a cold shower without him there as a shield.

Then they were in his room, the light flickering on as he brushed by it, and she only had a moment to take in the indelible way his personality had invaded the space before he pushed her down on the bed and crowded on top of her, mouth on hers and one leg pressed hard against her crotch. Later, she’d be sure she’d taken leave of her senses, as she rutted against that leg desperately seeking the friction he’d denied her when he’d slipped his finger from her and stepped away to leave her cold. On the edge, she was gone. There was nothing sensible about her brain or her body now, as she flushed hot and hotter and her entire body arched into him as though begging him to turn his attention back down to her cunt. His hand was back at her hip and she raised herself slightly so he could edge her pants off her hips, leaving them bunched around her thighs. He did the same with her underwear, and it felt bizarre to be laying there exposed so awkwardly with him fully dressed atop her.

Then his fingers were in her again, slipping easily into the wetness between her legs. The world narrowed to whining into his mouth, shuddering against him. A slow uncoiling of herself that stuttered and stalled as she slid a hand down to wrap around his wrist, fucking herself with his fingers as he placidly let her guide him, his eyes huge and blown impossibly dark. Still shaking as she sagged onto the bed into a damp patch left by her desire, releasing his hand. He slid it free with a wet sound and wriggled to slip out of his own pants, movements clumsy with a controlled sort of eagerness that was reassuring.

He was still himself, under all that misery and brokenness. Still Reid.

She lay still for a moment, shivering with the released tension of her climax as he undid her shirt completely, tracing a line of kisses up her chest with a tenderness that broke her heart. It was such a far cry from the rushed frantic pace of the beginning of their tryst, that she was struck with the odd notion that she was in bed with two completely different people, both of them fighting desperately for control. Long legs wrapped against hers, skinny and warm and surprisingly muscled, and she readjusted so she could pull him close and feel his heart beating through his ruffled shirt. He looked ridiculous, his erection visible between the tails of his shirt and his pants thrown aside, and she ached for him.

“Emily,” he whispered faintly, almost devoutly, eyes averted from hers as though he’d realized he was exposing himself to her through them, and she wrapped her arms around him and rolled him onto his back. A smooth move that was marred by her pants still restricting her movement, and he laughed softly as she almost sprawled before kicking them off with a loud complaint from the bedsprings.

He hadn’t laughed in weeks.

She bit her lip at the sound and tried not to let him see the emotion on her face as she straddled him, feeling him hard and sticky against her leg as she ran her hands down his side. He shivered under her touch, almost shyly, and she couldn’t look at his face without being lost in the vulnerability there.

She couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a dream she’d wake up alone from.

 

* * *

 

Her expression as she lost herself to pleasure was one he knew he’d never forget, locking it grimly in his memory even as he could still feel the waves of her orgasm rippling over his fingers. At some point between him pushing her back against the wall of his living room and them finding themselves here, everything had become edged with a strange kind of clarity. He was almost twitching out of his own skin, overwhelmed with the biting waves of emotion building in him and laced with the furious desire to lose himself completely in her skin.

It was too much, it was all too much, and he was going to completely come undone in this bed with her in his arms and reveal everything about himself he’d been trying to hide. He undid her shirt with the kind of reverence one normally saved for deities and almost groaned as he traced a line of kisses up her breast, feeling her heart beat gorgeously against his mouth. She was perfect, she was so fucking perfect and he was going to ruin it all with his contemptibility.  

And here it was, the proof he’d been lying to himself. He’d adored her from the start.

He murmured her name like an apology, like he could take back every wrong he’d done her just by saying it. “ _Emily_.”

He couldn’t look her in her eyes and face what he’d done, so he was taken completely by surprise when she wrapped her arms around him and rolled him onto his back, almost sprawling as her pants tangled around her legs. Her weight collapsed onto him for a moment and he choked out a startled laugh, freezing with shock at the unfamiliar noise as her face cleared as though he’d just given her an invaluable gift. He was achingly hard against her leg as she straddled him, so x   horribly close to giving him everything he wanted but in no way deserved.

Her hands ran up his side, pausing at the buttons of his rumpled shirt as though to undo them, and he couldn’t help but jerk out of her reach at the idea of her removing the thin layer of material and seeing what lay underneath. He expected her to get angry at his refusal to take his shirt off, even as she leaned over him with hers open and revealing endless lines of flushed skin and the delicate lacing of her bra, but she just smiled warmly and brushed her lips against his, placating.

“It’s fine, it’s all fine,” she said, and he wondered if she knew, or if she just thought he was shy. The juxtaposition of being shy about showing his chest while his cock was pressed against her leg or while his fingers were still damp from her didn’t seem to occur to her. She lowered herself alongside him and a moan slipped from his mouth unintentionally as he found himself pressing against her, feeling the warm wetness of her. He could rock his hips ever so slightly and find himself inside her, and the desire to do so almost overwhelmed him. He wanted to. It was nothing like the stranger. This wouldn’t be fucking, it wouldn’t be, he couldn’t just _fuck_ her. It would be so, so much more, and he was high.

He wasn’t so insecure that he couldn’t see the raw desire on her own face, and suddenly it occurred to him with a sick wave of horror that maybe it wasn’t just lust on her part either. Moments when her gaze had lingered slightly too long on his face played in his memory, the feeling of her pulse jittering under her skin that one night at the bar. How quickly she’d relented under his mouth, how quickly she’d come apart against his fingers. She’d come here tonight, after all.

As a friend, or as something more?

He couldn’t do this. This would destroy her.

The desire on her face was gone, replaced by concern and worry and he knew he’d frozen under her, his breathing shallow and eyes wide with panic. “Spencer? What’s wrong?” she asked, voice sharp, as she cupped a warm hand around his cheek. He tried to speak and wheezed instead; he was softening in panic against her. In one moment, he’d shattered everything they’d regained.

He needed her out of here before he dragged her down with him—and he knew exactly how to do it. It was so simple. His gaze locked onto hers, finally, and she frowned as the light finally caught his eyes. The admission cost him everything.

“I’m high.”


	3. Remembering How to Love You

This silence was the loudest quiet she’d ever experienced. She sat at the table, running her fingers over the smooth wood and thinking about nothing but breathing, listening to the soft sounds of her own heart beating. Downstairs someone called out, laughing. Outside, she could hear cars and sirens. It was like the apartment itself had hushed, waiting for something to happen. They were all unsure of what the next move was.

He stepped out of his room where he’d been since she’d gotten up and walked out without a word three hours before, dressed as carefully as though he was about leave for work. Even his tie was knotted, albeit crookedly, and he looked startled to see her, as though he’d assumed she’d left. She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t, aside from the small matter of her pants sitting crumpled on the floor of his bedroom. Maybe she wasn’t that angry at him, really. Maybe she was just furious with herself. For missing the signs. For ignoring the signs. For believing, for a heartbeat, that him wanting her wasn’t bizarrely out of character.

“Say something,” he said huskily, and she looked up into a face that just hours ago, she’d been falling in love with all over again. His lip was bleeding, she noted absently, feeling a pang of _something_ at the thought of him sitting in there worrying at it with his teeth.

He still smelled like their sweat and her perfume.

She couldn’t leave. Not when he was like this. The drugs were clearly affecting his inhibitions, today was absolutely proof of that. She wouldn’t leave him alone while he was like that.

But there were no words left to say.

 

* * *

 

She’d waited until dawn lightened the world outside before gathering her things and leaving, her mouth a firm line. Nothing was said between them, there was nothing that would absolve this.

Reid walked into his bathroom and emptied the wooden box with the bottles of narcotics into the sink, glass clinking against the porcelain. He slammed the box down onto the bottles, watching them shatter, and ran the tap until the light outside the windows was bright enough that he knew he was going to be late for work. At some point, the water swirling down the drain had run pink, and he pulled his hand out of the sink to numbly examine the numerous small cuts on his palm. A small part of him was pleased. The cuts would quantify time for him, at least for a little while.

Each day they healed was one more day away from this one.

 

* * *

 

She didn’t know what to say to him, not anymore. She still wasn’t sure what to make of that night, whether it was really Reid or if it was the drugs, and she was too scared to ask. He missed a flight, just one. When she saw him again, he’d gained a determination that was both frightening and hopeful.

“You need help,” she told him one day when it was just them in the elevator. He looked tired, he always did these days, but there was a colour in his skin there hadn’t been two weeks before, and his smile was genuine.

“I’m getting it,” he said, and she believed him. That night was rock bottom. The only way here for him was up.

 

* * *

 

“Movies tonight? Morgan and JJ are coming.” Reid gave her his best hopeful look, and she calculated how long the stack of paperwork in front of her would take. He read her mind, as always. “I can do half?”

“Alright,” she agreed, shoving more than half of the stack over to him and watching him bend over the desk with his pen busily scribbling away. It struck her as it did often that she knew what he looked like under those carefully presented clothes, knew what he looked like when he was focused on his body for once instead of his mind.

She knew what he looked like when he was high and on the knife’s edge of losing everything.

They were taking careful steps towards trying to rebuild what Hankel had taken from them, but he flinched now if she touched him and she couldn’t help but wonder how long this improved Reid could last.

 

* * *

 

Gideon left and Reid felt more alone than he’d felt in a long time. Emily was threatening to quit, Hotch too, and Reid sat at home and wondered dimly what it was about him that made everyone so keen to get away. The only consolation he had was that the idea of taking the easy way out, of finding one of his old dealers stupid enough to sell to an FBI agent and sink back into emptiness, didn’t tempt him. He blamed his addictive personality. He had a new craving these days.

She didn’t look at him the same way she’d used to anymore and there was an air of sadness between them that he didn’t know how to parse, but when she walked into the room she took up all the space in his brain. Anytime she brushed against him, he couldn’t help but vividly relive that night in his head, including the moment when he’d said the two words that had both destroyed and restored him. The look of alarm and dawning comprehension in her eyes at that moment had been every bit as horrifying as he’d imagined it would be before the fact.

It was some small source of sick amusement to him that he was pretty sure she’d loved him before that instant. It had been obvious in the trace of her fingers so gently in his skin and the awed/hushed way she’d mewled his name in the heartbeat before climaxing. It had been in the way she’d always been so quietly there for him, heaping every one of his hurts onto her slim shoulders and sharing in them. But she could never love him after that admission, never place her affections onto a desperate junkie burnt out by his failures.

He was always meant to be alone in the end.

But it didn’t change the way they worked together, and they still hung out outside of work. They never mentioned his problem again, and every time Reid earned another coin he left it under her mousepad for her to find; a silent apology and a promise to continue doing better.

They were in the compound on what should have been a routine mission when it all went to hell, and she took the fall for him. When he saw her again after it was all over, her face was a patchwork of cuts and bruising, and for a single, transient moment Reid knew what it was like to want to kill someone with his bare hands. It was a violent, overwhelming feeling that turned his blood to ice, and some of that fury must have shown in his face because she looked at him like he’d turned into a stranger. “Next time I’ll duck,” she said with a pained smile, trying to break the mood, her eyes wide and worried. He made a choked noise in his throat and nodded stiffly before walking away. Love could be an awfully vicious motivator.

And he loved her, still.

 

* * *

 

She took the beating so he didn’t have to, their hope for escape locked in that brilliant mind of his. She knew that he’d never see that. He’d only see her trying to protect him again, the one thing guaranteed to get his back up. He found her after the raid, sitting in the back of an ambulance with a paramedic carefully swabbing at her face and checking for broken bones. She looked up at him, prepared for concern and frustration and pretty sure that anything he threw at her, she could rebut. There was a perfectly good reason she’d let herself get caught, and he wouldn’t argue against plain logic.

She looked straight up into a face so coldly furious that she was frozen for a moment.

“Next time I’ll duck,” she said, forcing a smile onto her face. He blinked and the rage vanished, leaving him just looking sad. He nodded and walked away without saying a word. She thought maybe she was the only one in the world who’d ever seen that look on his face, and that knowledge took her breath away.

 

* * *

 

Reid didn’t mean to notice, but it was a little hard not to when he was required to be one of the most observant people in the world. One day she looked up at him with a grin that was just the right amount of friendly, and he noted with a detached sort of numbness the new shade of lipstick she was wearing and the faded stamp on her left hand.

“Hot date last night?” Morgan asked with a smirk, leaning over the partition between hers and Reid’s desk and nodding at her hand.

She twitched an eyebrow and shook her head at their incorrigible friend. “I can’t get anything past you lot, can I? What if I just went out with a friend?”

“New lipstick,” Reid said quietly, and she stiffened as though she’d forgotten he was there.

“It was a date.” The admission was rigid and awkward in a way he thought they’d moved past months ago, and she looked down at her desk clearly signalling that the conversation was over. Morgan looked confused for a second and then his eyes widened and he stared at Reid in a way that suggested their months of secrecy had very abruptly come to an end.

 

* * *

 

Nothing stayed secret for long among profilers. She should be shocked it had taken them this long. Garcia called her up with a request for a signature on a file, but as soon as she walked into the IT tech’s room, she was faced with a very concerned Penelope and an oddly intimidating JJ.

“Did you sleep with Spence?” JJ hissed with narrowed eyes, and Prentiss didn’t even answer before Garcia gasped.

“Oh my _god_ , you _did_ ,” she said, hands over her mouth. “When did this happen? Why was I not informed? What happened? Are you okay?”

“Is he okay?” JJ cut in, her mouth twisting unhappily.

“I didn’t sleep with him.” Prentiss couldn’t help the defensive tone in her voice. It was very much like being circled by a pack of angry mother wolves. “We… almost did. Sort of did. Something happened. We’re not together, it was one night months ago.”

JJ suddenly sighed, her eyes flickering over Prentiss’s face as though something she’d been trying to work out for a long time had suddenly become clear. “You loved him.” Past tense.

“Once,” Prentiss said, hoping they didn’t notice the pain held in that one word.

They did.

 

* * *

 

“Was it just one night?”  Morgan was as determined as a dog trying to get a bone, not letting up for a moment with his questioning.

Reid ran the water over his hands, irritably shaking them dry as his friend crowded him into the bathroom. “It wasn’t even one night, we didn’t sleep together. Not… not really.”

“Something happened though? Come on man, you looked gutted out there. You don’t look like that unless there’s a history.”

“Something happened,” he snapped, suddenly furious. “Leave it Morgan, it was ages ago. It’s not relevant anymore.”

A hand against his shoulder held him in place. “If it’s not relevant, then why do you still look at her like she’s the only person in the room?” Morgan asked Reid gently, and for once Reid didn’t have an answer.

 

* * *

 

Anthrax. The bloody _idiot_ got infected with anthrax. Out of everyone in the world, fucking Spencer bloody Reid managed to walk into that shed and infect himself with _anthrax_. He actually had the _audacity_ to almost _die_. Prentiss felt furiously betrayed. She’d thought after the last time he’d almost died that they’d come to some sort of agreement about this kind of thing: Reid was absolutely not allowed to die, or almost die, or engage in any behaviour that could theoretically lead to his death.

She hadn’t been aware of speaking out loud as she paced with her thoughts racing angrily through her mind, but when she spun on her heel to face the line of stiff-backed chairs holding her team, they were all staring at her with raised eyebrows.

“Maybe you should sit down?” Rossi said, standing and gesturing to his chair. “You’re frightening people.”

“Maybe you should go in last,” JJ added, smirking slightly. Morgan elbowed her, grinning.

“No way, send her in first. Maybe she’ll scare Reid enough that he’ll stop getting into trouble.”

“I doubt it,” Hotch replied shortly, closing his eyes and leaning his head back to wait for news. She sat and focused on her breathing and wondering how the team would react if she saved Reid the trouble and just killed him herself.

 

* * *

 

Doyle was back.

He was back, it was only a matter of time before he came after her, and she was so unbelievably terrified she couldn’t think for the fear of it. Nights were spent with her focus locked on every noise or movement around her home that could possibly constitute a threat, her days melding into a soft blur of exhaustion. The only time she could feasibly let her guard down was at work, but if she kept doing that then her team was going to notice and start asking questions. Questions that would put them in danger. It said something about her life that the only time she felt safe was when she was at her workplace hunting serial killers…

The previous years had lulled her into a false sense of security, teasing her with the possibility of a life beyond what she’d done in her past. Everything had just settled into a calm sort of normalcy. It was everything she’d ever wanted. Now it was gone, shattered with a purple lilac and a simple phone call from her old handler. She spent as long as she could fighting her exhaustion, but in the end she went to the one place she knew she could be safe, even for just a little while.

 

* * *

 

The knock at his door was completely unexpected. Reid answered it holding a bowl of soggy cereal, wearing a tattered dressing gown and feeling perplexed by the woman standing there. “Emily?”

She smiled shakily. That shakiness terrified him. Emily was _never_ anything even remotely approaching shaky. “Can I stay here tonight? My apartment is being fumigated.” That didn’t seem right, but he wasn’t so sure of himself that he was okay with accusing her of lying.

“Err… okay. You can take the… bed. I normally sleep on the couch anyway.” They both noted the hesitation before he said ‘bed’, but she let it go without comment. “Cereal?”

Her face twisted and he could practically see her wondering how her life had gone so astray that he was her friend. “For dinner? Reid, you know there’s more to a balanced diet than sugar, right?”

“Sure. I drink coffee too.”

Her laughter was genuine, and when she emerged from his bathroom an hour later, looking more relaxed than she had in weeks, it was almost like everything was finally coming back together.

 

* * *

 

She refused the bed, of course she did. She wasn’t going to invade Reid’s privacy and take his bed as well, and she wouldn’t put it past him to lie about sleeping on the couch just so she wouldn’t feel bad. But, later that night when he’d drifted off to his room to presumably sleep—or do whatever it was he did when full of enough caffeine to give an elephant the jitters—, she pressed her face against the clean sheets covering the surprisingly comfortable couch and thought that maybe he’d been telling the truth. The couch smelled like him, and her body sunk easily into it as though someone had lain like that many times before. She thought of him curled up just like she was now, and her stomach twisted slightly in an emotion almost like longing.

The morning, and Doyle, feel wonderfully far away and, as she softly breathed in the scent of him, she thought that maybe they could finally try again. It wasn’t the right time, but when had they ever gotten a right time?

 

* * *

 

He was flicking slowly through a book, savouring the text in a way that felt almost decadent, when his door creaked open and she padded in. Neither of them said anything when she slipped into the bed next to him and he lay an arm around her cautiously, pulling her close against him. The book was set aside. There was silence between them; she was breathing quickly and her hair smelled like his shampoo. He traced her body with his hands: the bare legs, the oversized tee, fingers soft on the fine hem of her panties. Neither of them said anything as she leaned in and pressed her lips against his, pushing him back against the pillow and curling a leg around him.

He still didn’t say anything, or stop her, as she unbuttoned his pyjama top and slid it off of his shoulders, slowly running her hand up his bicep as she looked at the skin of his inner arm with an expression that was terrifyingly close to pride.

In the end, neither of them spoke at all until it was over and she fell asleep naked against his side, the skin of her chest still flushed prettily. He wrapped himself around her like a protective shield against whatever was frightening her and nuzzled his nose into her hair, savouring his scent on her. He hoped that, if anything, the slow way he’d loved her tonight with his hands and his heart had showed her that he wouldn’t let anything hurt her again. Especially not himself.

“I never stopped loving you,” he whispered like it was a secret.

Perhaps is a way, it was.

 

* * *

 

“I never stopped loving you,” he whispered into her hair. She didn’t let him see that she was awake, hoping to hell he couldn’t see the tears on her face.

_I forgot how to love you, but I remember now_ , she thought but she didn’t say. Not yet, not with Doyle out there. She refused to have him believe he needed to protect her—because he would, he so would, and if was hurt doing so she could never forgive herself.

There’d be time later.

 

* * *

 

“She never made it off the table,” JJ said, and her eyes never left his.

He tried to run, tried to do what he should have done four years ago, when he’d taken her pulse at that crowded bar, but JJ touched his arm and froze him in place with the soft sounds of his friends’ grief behind him. “Spence?”

She was expecting tears, expecting anger and torment and destruction. He didn’t give her that.

“I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye,” he said numbly, but what he really wanted to ask was: how could it be the end when it had felt so much like a beginning?


	4. Our Last Goodbye

He carried her coffin and the weight of it dragged him down into the cold earth alongside her.

 

* * *

 

His cell vibrated with astonishing regularity over the next two weeks as his friends all appeared to conspire to never leave him the hell alone. Morgan’s texts were bitter with his own failure to stop her life from leaking out from under his own hands; Garcia’s were shocked and consoling. JJ’s were quick and to the point, increasing in desperation with every unanswered message. Hotch sent only five, and every one of them was heavy with the memory of Haley. Rossi didn’t text, but every night Reid heard a knock at his door and found food in expensive dishes carefully placed upon the stoop.

He read every one of them and answered none.

 

* * *

 

**Blackbird: D?**

**Cheeto_breath: He’s tough. He has P to help him.**

**Blackbird: I’m glad.**

**Cheeto_breath: I need to know. What happened with S? What do I need to expect?**

**Blackbird: Nothing.**

**Blackbird: Everything.**

 

* * *

 

His bed still smelled of her and he avoided it, even as every trace of her in his room began to fade with the passing of time. He could feel his soul slipping out of his grasp as her scent dissipated. He wondered what would happen if he stopped trying to hold on. Instead he went out and got staggeringly drunk, and tried to lose himself in the night.

 

* * *

 

“Hotchner.” The light on the digital clock by his bedside glittered sharply in his sleep-heavy eyes as he answered the phone as crisply as though he hadn’t been sleeping at all.

“Hotch,” Reid breathed in his ear, and it was an apology and a cry for help all at once. Hotch was up in seconds, reaching for his wallet and freezing as he remembered his son sleeping down the hall.

But he knew the cost of inaction.

“Wait where you are, we’re coming.”

 

* * *

 

Reid lifted his head blearily as Rossi stepped out of his car, wearing a dressing gown and a wry expression, but he didn’t try to get up. He couldn’t. In the end, Rossi had to drag him up and practically carry him to the car, droving back to Rossi’s house in silence. Partially recovered, Reid followed his co-worker silently into the living room, still not speaking as Rossi pulled out a decanter of whisky and two glasses, dropping them onto the table. “Here’s your choice, kid. You can go upstairs and sleep and stop trying to drink her memory away…”

“Or?” His voice was dry and husky from disuse. He hadn’t cried yet. He didn’t think he remembered how to anymore.

“Or we can both get absolutely plastered and cry on each other’s shoulders. I’m up now anyway.”

 

* * *

 

“You fucking bastard,” Rossi slurred over the phone to him, and Hotch’s heart sank into his shoes. He knew it would be Rossi who’d work out the vanishing act they’d pulled; he was the only one who didn’t automatically trust Hotch implicitly. “You absolute wankering _bastard_.”

“Are you drunk?” Hotch asked incredulously. “Where’s Reid? I told you to pick him up, not get drunk with him.”

“He’s in love with her, did you know?” Rossi’s tone was mournful, and Hotch realized with a jolt that he hadn’t been caught at all. He didn’t know if he was relieved or disappointed.

“I know.”

 

* * *

 

**Cheeto_breath: I miss you.**

**_Blackbird is offline._ **

 

* * *

 

He _wanted_.

He wanted a fair number of things these days. He wanted to be alone, he wanted Emily, he wanted oblivion, he wanted his friends, he wanted Emily… he couldn’t even sort out the threads of all his wanting, spending his days with desires pulling him in every different direction. Instead, he went to JJ’s and spent his nights sitting numbly at her kitchen table, watching her and Will move about each other as though they were trapped in the orbit each other’s bodies.

He wanted.

Oddly, it made it easier not to give in to the baser desires when the thing that he truly craved was well beyond his reach.

“We can bury you alongside her if you’d rather,” Morgan said one day, and he was harsh and cold because to be otherwise would be to admit to himself that he’d lost her too. Reid looked around at his team and saw the grief that drew lines across their faces. They were all mourning, and he should feel angry because they didn’t know the first thing about what it was to mourn Emily Prentiss, but he couldn’t remember how to be.

“The average human could probably survive five hours buried in a coffin of typical size,” he said instead, and Morgan looked like he was torn between laughing and crying. “But, on the bright side, you’d be unconscious before you died because of the build-up of carbon monoxide. It would be painless.” The others smiled at the return of encyclopaedia Reid, but JJ met his eyes, and she looked terrified.

 

* * *

 

JJ rocked up on his doorstep with a black cat in her arms. “He was Emily’s,” she said by way of explanation, and somehow out of that Reid got a cat.

“I don’t know what to do with you,” he told the cat later, when JJ was gone. Sergio just purred and licked his leg in a self-satisfied manner, completely ignoring Reid’s existence. That, he could deal with. Oddly, it was comforting to have something rely on him. One less reason to fail.

 

* * *

 

**Cheeto_breath: Sergio has moved in with S.**

**Blackbird: He’s going to kill my cat.**

**Cheeto_breath: He lets Sergio sleep on his chest.**

**Blackbird: My cat is going to kill him.**

 

* * *

 

He went to her grave, just once, to see how it felt.  It was surprisingly uneventful. He couldn’t help but feel nothing for the packed earth and emotionless gravestone in front of him. The heavy lettering spelled out her name in a blocky monotype and tried to fit her entire life and everything about her into a line between two dates. None of it felt familiar. None of it felt like _her_.

“I loved you,” he tried, and that sounded wrong. “I… I still love you.” That didn’t sound any better. A bee hummed nearby; he hated it passionately for the life that held it in the air, however fleetingly. “You were the best and worst of me,” he finally managed in a low voice, and that sounded truer. “I love you more than anything, but I guess death just doesn’t care how much a person is loved. And you… you are so loved.”

In that he put Morgan’s guilt, and JJ’s friendship, and Garcia’s smile. There was more than just him in the loss they shared. He’d made the mistake before of forgetting that.

 

* * *

 

**Blackbird: How is he?**

**Cheeto_breath: He’s fine.**

**Blackbird: Really?**

**Cheeto_breath: He will be.**

 

* * *

 

Reid woke up one day and felt fine.

He padded off the couch in his socks and made a coffee, musing over the startling lack of misery, and felt a pang only once when Sergio sat in front of him and mewled dementedly for his breakfast. Other than that, he felt fine. Even grief eventually runs its course.

 

* * *

 

**Cheeto_breath: Where are you?**

**_Blackbird is offline._ **

**Cheeto_breath: Happy birthday.**

**_Blackbird is offline._ **

**Blackbird: Doyle’s back, isn’t he?**

**_Cheeto_breath is offline._ **

**_Blackbird is offline._ **

**Cheeto_breath: Christ E. I thought… you didn’t reply for a month. You can’t do this, you can’t just vanish. I need to know you’re okay.**

**Cheeto_breath: And yes.**

**Cheeto_breath: I’ll keep you updated. Don’t do anything rash.**

**_Blackbird is offline._ **

**_Blackbird is online._ **

**Blackbird: I’m coming home. Tell them or I will.**

 

* * *

 

Reid walked into the conference room to find Emily standing there, and the only thing he could think to himself was how kind madness had turned out to be in its descent upon him.

“Reid, let me explain,” Hotch said, because of course Hotch was going to try to take the fall for this, but Reid could see the guilt and self-recrimination in every line of JJ’s body.

“Spencer?” Emily said softly, and he looked into her familiar eyes and _oh,_ that was how to feel fury. And she was _alivealivealivealive_ and all he could feel is anger. He nodded in assent because he had to, and he did his job because that was who he was.

He was going to find Doyle and stop him. Because they’d got it wrong when they’d said Emily was alive, said she was back. They’d thought that it would stop his grief. In the end, it was only a different kind of loss.

And it changed nothing.

 

* * *

 

Emily went to his home just once, because she had to. There was anger crowding in on her from every side, and if she could just convince him that she was back to stay, then she’d have something to cling to.

Morgan was shattered, almost devastatingly so, and she’d forgotten in her worry about Spencer that Morgan had been the one to hold her as she’d died. Rossi’s rage was unexpected, and while he was stiffly courteous to her in a way that suggested at least part of him was happy to see her, he stormed out of Hotch’s office an hour later pale and shaking. Hotch didn’t leave until late that night, and as Emily watched him go, there was an exhaustion to his stride that she’d never seen before.

All those hearts broken, and her the cause.

Spencer opened the door as though he’d been expecting her and stared at her with empty eyes. He didn’t step aside to let her in, and she was suddenly horribly aware of what it was like to be closed out. “Why are you here?”

“To explain.”

He was already shaking his head. “You don’t owe me that. Morgan, yes. Rossi too, if you ever want him and Hotch to be friends again. Probably even JJ, because this is going to cost her our trust. But you owe me nothing.”

Her words were hurried, trying to fit them in before he could close the door forever. “I owe you everything.”

She’d never noticed how old his eyes were. “You’re alive. That’s enough.”

“Please… we need to talk about us.”

A soft, deep breath and suddenly she was fourteen again and her first boyfriend had just walked into the room with _that_ look in his eyes, and she wanted nothing more than to stop the words that he was about to say.

“There is no us. There will never be an us. Because you keep leaving, for all the right reasons, and I keep staying for all the wrong ones. This is the last goodbye, I won’t say it again.” He looked down at his odd socks and she thought she could see the glint of a tear on his face. “Sometimes people are meant to fall in love, but not meant to be together.”

“I don’t believe that.” Even as she said it, she knew it was useless.

He smiled sadly and stepped back to close the door. “We’ll be friends again,” he promised her. “One day. But that’s it. Goodbye, Emily.” The door closed between them, and she hissed a breath out between her teeth that she hadn’t been aware she was holding, laying a hand against the cold wood.

“Goodbye, Spencer.”

 

* * *

 

In the end, the choice to go was the simplest one she’d ever made. She owed them all that much. She left a note under his door on her way to the airport, knowing he’d find it but doubting he’d read it.

> _Spencer._
> 
> _Thank you for your love. This isn’t goodbye—we said there wouldn’t be any more._ _I’ll see you again._
> 
> _Love, Emily._
> 
> _P.S. Sergio likes banana milkshake, if you haven’t already found out. And corn chips._

* * *

**one message received: 11:47, 5/5/2013**

_Hey Spence, it’s Emily. I’m in town for a week. Shall we get a drink? You know my number, of course you do._

“Emily? Sure, what time?”

**Author's Note:**

> **Edited August, 2017.**


End file.
